Here Be Dragons

Every January I get that same, giddy feeling. Another year full of potential lies before us like uncharted territory. But there could be trouble ahead. As cartographers used to write on unexplored lands – here be dragons.

Will this be the year we finally lose weight? Win the lottery? Have unforeseen surgery? Finally get married? Finally get divorced? Move?

Lose that last, dumb, bad habit? Lose the house in a fire?

It’s exciting when you think about it – so many possibilities, so many potential disasters. Here be dragons indeed.

Maybe this year we’ll go camping. Or volunteer at the after-school literacy program. Or start painting again. Or finally watch the rest of Game of Thrones. Or not.

One thing I’m finally going to do for sure is update all my software, and back up all my files to an external drive and the cloud. Yeah. Sure.

And clean out the garage, and take those dried up paint cans to the recycling place – and the old electronics and computers too. As soon as I download all the documents and folders off of them. Any minute now.

And I’ll finally get my office filing system purged, sorted, and well, filed.

And the photos. Oh God, the photos.

So January is looking pretty busy.

But then I stop and tell myself, wait. Hold on. Why are you doing this again? Why are you creating all these ridiculous scenarios, these bright fantasies of accomplishment? It’s one thing to have aspirations – it’s another to be delusional.

What’s really going to happen is this. On that fine January morning I’m going to get up, have some coffee, read for a bit, then log on and take care of correspondence. A dozen emails to write, website updates to create, performance and speaking schedules to manage. And then there are upcoming writing deadlines to prioritize, and articles, columns, and courses to plan, draft, format, and finalize. By then it’s lunch.

After lunch I notice that the kitchen could use some attention. I’ll empty, then fill the dishwasher. And throw in a load of laundry, or three. Maybe pop over to the store for some food, and get a plan for dinner going.

Then I remember that the car needs gas, and there are a few things at the dry cleaners that need picking up. I’ve forgotten them so long they probably sold them by now.

Pulling back into the driveway I see my neighbor raking the last leaves of winter from beneath her bare trees. We chat for a while about neighborhood stuff and recent travels – hers to London, ours to Sedona – and then I hear the drier buzzer. Time to swap loads.

Coming back into the house with my groceries and dry cleaning I see that the cat has vomited in the hallway. I clean it up.

I put away the groceries and wonder what surprises all those unmarked containers in the freezer hold. They must be something good or I wouldn’t have frozen them. I’ll figure it out later.

Then a cool song I heard in the car by Dawes or Steve Earle or somebody rises up in my head and I grab my guitar to chase whatever comes along. A new song takes shape. I am only vaguely aware that I have anything to do with it – it seems to be writing itself, or simply arriving. I have two verses, a chorus, and part of a bridge when the buzzer sounds again. I take the hot, dry clothes out of the dryer and load in the cold, soggy ones from the washer. I push the buttons.

I see that the mail has arrived. Including those two checks I’ve been waiting for. I sign them and deposit them with the credit union app on my phone.

The phone rings and I talk to a friend for half an hour.

The sun is getting low. Better start dinner.

And fold the laundry.

When Lori gets home from her long day at work, we finish making dinner and eat. Then more dishes.

And now it’s dark. It’s been a long day. Feet up.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get to that garage clean-up and all the rest of the things on my to-do list. But now, I got a peaceful, easy feeling. The work is done.

Some laughs. Stories. Reconnection. Holding hands as we fall asleep.

What’s the point of having a home if you don’t stop to enjoy it? Your house shouldn’t only be a work site, a place of unending obligations and incomplete tasks. A home should be a refuge, a safe place to hide, a soft place to land. A place to dream dreams.

I’m taking a second look at my January plans.

Maybe this time I’ll just keep it simple. One thing at a time. As I engage in each task, really be present in that task, instead of thinking about the next nine things I have to do as soon as I finish this one. And leave plenty of time between for neighbors, songs, and the beauty of the world pouring in through the windows.

A contemplative mood is one of the special treasures of winter.

January may be a time of starting over. But it’s also a time for looking back. January gets its name from the Roman god Janus, the keeper of keys and doorways. (Janus is also where janitors get their name – they too have the key to every door). Janus has an unusual feature. You’d notice it right away if you ever saw him. He has two faces – one looking back and one looking forward. This gives Janus a breadth of awareness many of us lack. Most of us focus only on our own narrow, immediate interests.

But Janus sees it all. The wisdom he’s gained from his long perspective enables him to correctly assess the value of this present moment. He’s well aware of everything that’s been lost. And he’s also aware that up ahead there be dragons. But it doesn’t stop him from turning the key and opening doors anyway. He doesn’t hide from the past, nor does he fear the future. His is a total and heartfelt acceptance. In his wisdom he knows what to do, and he knows how to do it.

So do we.

The balance we strike between intention and renunciation is the vibrant nexus from which our most authentic creativity comes. Are we willing to show up fully alive in this next now moment, free from the past and heartily accepting of the future? More than any other force, the consciousness we bring into this moment shapes whatever unfolds. When we resolve to live purposefully, deliberately, authentically, and courageously, the doors begin to open. We hold in our hands the keys of Janus. And damn the dragons. “Once you make a decision,” Emerson wrote, “the universe conspires to make it happen.”

The Nature of Fear

Fear is good. It keeps us alive. It keeps us from falling off cliffs, touching fire and kissing rattlesnakes. But fear is also our greatest liability. It keeps us from taking the risks necessary to develop our unrealized potential. If we let it, fear has the power to keep us from becoming who we really are. Fear is a thief that steals our joy.

The daily work of every thinking man and woman is to practice careful discernment in the assessment of their fear. A life of pointless risk-taking is dangerous and foolish while a life devoted to the avoidance of all risk is doomed to frustration, stagnation and incompletion.  Fear is neither good nor evil; it is a message from our psyche that must be read with great care. Cultivating the skill to interpret fear accurately is an essential task in the creation of the well-lived and fully-realized life. When fear arises, ask yourself these seven questions.

1. If I do this frightening thing, will it bring real quality and beauty into my life?

2. If I do this frightening thing, will it move me further toward the fullest expression of my innate potentialities?

3. Am I respecting my health and life, and the health and life of others?

4. Is this fear really just a misguided attempt to protect my fragile and limiting self-image?

5. Is this apprehension and anxiety simply the death-throes of my outmoded ways of acting, thinking and being in the world?

6. If I took these risks and let go of my old ways of acting, thinking and being in the world, would I be closer to my highest good?

7. Is the larger purpose of my life the realization of my highest good as opposed to being comfortable?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your fear is telling you something important. You should probably listen. It’s difficult to reach your highest potential if you are maimed or dead, and it’s difficult to manifest your fullest happiness if your actions harm others. But if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, then you should override your fear and take action. And by the way, if you can answer yes to even one of these questions, you are implicitly answering yes to all of them.

Helpful research from the field of psychology shows that our thinking is stuck in two important and debilitating ways. The first is negative thinking. We tend to exaggerate the scale and frequency of negative situations and minimize or overlook positive situations or circumstances. Through tens of thousands of years of evolution, human consciousness has grown highly adept at scanning the horizon, both literally and figuratively, for problems and potential disasters. The individual who most rapidly perceives the impending problem – the crouching Saber toothed tiger, the lethally poisonous snake, the toxic forest mushroom – has a far better chance of survival and passing on his genes. Natural selection rewards caution.

If negative thinking isn’t successfully challenged, the mistaken notion that fearful living equals wisdom takes hold, hindering the necessary risk required in any process of growth or advancement.

The second prevalent mode of consciousness that seems to have grown beyond the bounds of its usefulness is confirmation bias. We exaggerate evidence that supports our preconceived positions and ignore or denigrate evidence that challenges our preconceived positions. The positive aspect of confirmation bias is that in enables us to bond tightly with an in-group that shares our perspective, a dynamic that helps us form close families and tribes. The negative aspect of confirmation bias is that it locks us into a worldview in which accurate and wide-ranging critical thinking is no longer possible. Our fears become dogma – unquestionable truths closed to inquiry and investigation.  

When you put negative thinking and confirmation bias together, you have a serious problem. All manner of evils begin to take shape – racism, xenophobia, nationalism, bigotry, arrogance, and ethnocentrism. In other words, fear becomes the idol before which all must kneel. To move beyond fear means to correct the imbalance and empirical inaccuracy of negative thinking and confirmation bias. An honest assessment of the environment shows that the universe is not a hostile, dangerous field of impending disasters. Yes there are dangers, but the fact remains that we are supported and nourished continually by an uninterrupted flow of abundance. The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the light and beauty and love of the world and its myriad creatures hold us aloft in an unbreakable web of being. This isn’t some hippie dream. It’s a measurable fact.

And when we begin to awaken from the illusion of individual and tribal superiority, our natural humility is restored and we begin to recognize that our ideologies and arguments are not universally authoritative – there are other, equally valid ways of understanding the complexities before us and there are other, equally viable ways of organizing society, determining justice and supporting what is best in us. In other words, we move from fearful self-obsession to loving-kindness. A broad and generous smile replaces the narrow, guarded squint through which we had been viewing the world.

And when we begin to view the world differently, the world changes. As the Talmud reminds us, “We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.”

Breaking free of the debilitating effects of fear is an inside job.

Maybe the first step is to recognize that uncertainty is a necessary precondition for all growth and emergence. How could a seed know what lay above the surface of the soil? Yet it pushes upward anyway. How could a mother know what lay ahead for her and her baby? But she gives birth anyway. How could a guitar player know if this solo is going to be great or an awkward failure? But he throws himself into it with finesse, skill and abandon anyway, trusting the truth that there is no beauty without risk. Becoming comfortable with uncertainty is an essential component of any creative process, especially the creation of a magnificent life.

It was early in the year 1933. America was in the abyss of the Great Depression and genuine hardship was tearing apart the fabric of this once great nation. In the opening lines of his first inaugural address, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke the immortal words, “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Ten million Americans heard his voice crackling through their radios, and many more read his words in the next morning’s paper. His simple truth struck a chord and sparked a shift in consciousness. The radical notion that fear itself was the enemy – not external conditions no matter how dire – was a message that brought hope into a hopeless world. How powerful it is to consider the possibility that fear, an important ally when carefully and critically managed, can become the most crippling hindrance.  

Things You Don't Have to Do

I know you’re busy. Everybody’s busy. We are being crushed by our to-do lists. Maybe I can help. Here’s a whole list of things you don’t have to do.

You don’t have to do everything. You don’t have to be perfect. You don’t have to right every wrong, heal every wound and bridge every gap between what is and what should be. You don’t have to fix all of the broken things.

You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to figure everything out. You don’t have to force the uncarved whole into tiny conceptual boxes.

You also don’t have to explain yourself. You don’t have to reduce the mystery of whom and what you are to a category, a type, a box checked on a government form. You don’t have to force your boundless nature into a mold someone else made.

You are not defined by your race, your gender, your ethnicity, your national origin, your political affiliation, your sexual orientation, your ideology, your body, your strengths, your weaknesses or your endless lists of opinions, preferences and aversions. What you really are lies beyond all of those layers of window dressing.

You don’t have to worry about the future. You don’t have to waste one more iota of energy carefully imagining every possible negative outcome and then struggle to avoid those imagined outcomes with tools forged from your own cleverness. You don’t have to bear the burden of every conceivable what-if and yeah-but. You can put them down. As the old Zen saying goes, “How refreshing, the whinny of a pack horse unburdened of everything.”

You don’t have to be someone you’re not. You don’t have to compare yourself to everyone you meet, measuring their best qualities against your worst. You don’t have to violate your own nature in a vain attempt to emulate someone else’s.

You don’t have to match anyone else’s timeline. You don’t have to march alongside anyone or anything else. You don’t have to force the natural flow of events and seasons into the rows and columns of anyone’s timetable spreadsheet, including your own.

You don’t have to believe your harshest self-assessment. You don’t have to believe your own definitions of failure. You might be wrong.

You don’t have to be afraid. You don’t have to assume that the universe is a dangerous, hostile place. You don’t have to believe the worst about other people.

You don’t have to buy the next newest thing. You don’t have to want what corporations, marketing departments and salesmen tell you to want.

You don’t have to obey every craving. You don’t have to believe that happiness only comes later, after every need’s been met.

You don’t have to keep running away. You don’t have to keep avoiding the simple truths that are trying to catch up to you. Slow down. They will find you.

You don’t have to be deaf to that still, soft, inner voice. You don’t have to stay so busy, so distracted, so overwhelmed that you remain forever knocked off balance. You don’t have to allow the noise of your busyness to drown out the quiet truths arising in the stillness at your center.

You don’t have to manage everything. You don’t have to scrutinize, assess and manipulate every piece of the puzzle. You don’t have to write the master plan.

You don’t have to keep eating when you’re full. You don’t have to believe the lie that it’s never enough.

You don’t have to get drunk or high. You don’t have to repeat forever habits you picked up when you were young and scared. You don’t have to obey your fear.

You don’t have to shut down when you feel your feelings arise. You don’t have to push away what you cannot control. You don’t have to make your heart an empty, hostile place full of shadows, open wounds, self-doubt and endless hunger.

You don’t have to be lonely. You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to feel unsafe outside the four walls of your cage.

You don’t have to be unhappy.

You don’t have to struggle against change and strain to hold on to things that are trying to fade away.

You don’t have to have an opinion about everything. You don’t have to mistake your own fleeting judgments for truths.

You don’t have to have a perfect family, whatever that is. You don’t have to feel deep, warm and vibrant connections with all of your relatives, or feel guilty and ashamed if you don’t. You don’t have to force your family to conform to a fictional, idealized fantasy.

You don’t have to eliminate all anger and pain from your life. You don’t have to iron out every crease, soak out every stain or chase away every confusion. In the waves of life, you don’t have to define every peak as a success and every trough as a failure.

You don’t have to agree with anyone else’s ideology. You don’t have to accept anyone else’s definition of God, no matter how earnest their pronouncements, no matter how ancient and hallowed their tradition. You don’t have to abandon your own deeply held inner convictions because they conflict with a mass movement or popular theology.

You don’t have to belong to any groups because they’re said to be important. You don’t have to blindly ascribe to any nationalisms, especially if they draw their strength from a sense of exceptionalism or superiority. Empires come and go. Humanity knows nothing of empires. Plant your flag in something that lasts.

Life is short. Don’t waste these precious hours, days, weeks, months and years on things that don’t matter. Do the work that has been given to you to do. Find a way to let go of your fears and live the life your soul is asking for. Let what is trying to emerge through you emerge. Become a part of something larger than yourself. Your bliss depends on it. Shed your limited and limiting definition of yourself. Pledge that you will no longer cling to ways of living that do not serve your highest good. Promise yourself that you will stop waiting for the right time. Now is the right time. There is so much we have yet to do. Each of us has our small part to play. Drop everything that doesn’t matter. Don’t waste another second doing things you don’t have to do.

Runaway Train

How do you stop a runaway train? How do you break that racing chain of thoughts and worries and plans and schemes? How do you stop the spinning kaleidoscope of all-possible-scenarios that flood the mind’s eye with a dizzying array of fragmented colors and lines that lead nowhere? If the mind is such a powerful part of life, why do we over-think everything to death?

From the perspective of evolutionary biology, it makes sense that the early human beings who worried a lot and excelled at imagining elaborate worst-case-scenarios would have a better chance of survival. The hyper-vigilant hominid perpetually anxious about whether or not there was a saber-toothed tiger in the bushes was far more likely to survive and pass on his genes than his more lackadaisical brother, you know, the one they call “Tiger Food”. Traits like the capacity to worry were naturally selected by the process of evolution. The result? Modern humans have an inordinate capacity to vividly imagine every conceivable negative outcome and spend a lot of time worrying about the worst possible future, a place where everything goes wrong, everything is lost and everyone hates you. Early humans who worried about scarcity of resources would work harder to store up food. They would envision future problems and work hard to prevent them by creating elaborate plans. As a result, they would be far more likely to survive than their live-for-today neighbors who never worried about a thing and died from easily preventable missteps. We are the children of worriers.

So here’s the problem. We modern humans have plenty of food and adequate shelter and extremely long odds on the possibility of saber-toothed tiger attack, yet we still carry around with us this vestigial and irrelevant conditioning. Our capacity for worry and fear far outstrips our actual risk factors. The mind, once our greatest asset, is now our greatest liability.

Have you ever woken up at three in the morning, mind racing, thoughts crowding, worries bearing down on you like angry bees? It’s dark. Everyone’s asleep. You’re lying there perfectly safe in your bed. You’re not thirsty and you don’t have to pee. There’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. And yet there you are, adrenalin-sopped, heart racing, blood pounding, desperately envisioning endless possible negative outcomes, inventing problems and emotionally inhabiting them for absolutely no reason whatsoever. It’s all just conditioning playing itself out, echoes of once-useful impulses. There are no saber-toothed tigers.

Maybe it’s time to turn these giant brains of ours back on themselves. Maybe we should do a little thinking about thinking.

The first thing you have to do is laugh. It’s all sort of silly how the thought-stream sucks us into a vortex of anxiety despite the absence of any legitimate cause. And when you laugh, the death-grip of the mind is loosened. I always worry a little when I visit churches or synagogues or mosques or classrooms or satsangs where no one’s laughing, where a desperately serious and self-important air hangs over the entire room and every soul in it. Without laughter, people too easily fall prey to the ever-pervasive thought-stream. When we laugh, the whole charade is exposed and we, for a moment anyway, return to our original selves, free and easy, as we were before these giant brains took over. That’s why laughing feels so good. It is a glimpse of freedom.

The second thing to do is decide to set into motion some different patterns. Now that the shackles of the busy mind are no longer hidden, it’s time to search for the right key to unlock them for good. Techniques like meditation, centering prayer, physical exercise, music, dance, immersion in the beauty of nature, practicing loving kindness toward others – these are all proven and effective methods for breaking the tyranny of the thought-stream. There are also a whole host of other remedies that are far less effective: television, shopping, drugs, alcohol or any other form of sensual escapism. The problem with these “solutions” is that they tend to create as many or more problems than they solve. Some people realize this after the first bong hit. For others, it takes thirty years of addiction for the bloom to fade from the rose.

My friend the spiritual teacher Will Newsom uses the analogy of a compass. When we are trapped in the thought-stream, drowning in currents of worry and fear, it’s as if our compass needle is jitterbugging all over the place. How do we get the needle to settle back to truth north? How do we restore our original inner-peace, our naturally joyful equilibrium? We cannot force the needle to go where we want it. In other words, you can’t solve the problem of over-thinking with more thinking. “A problem cannot be solved,” said Einstein, “with the same consciousness that created it.” Like trying to see your own eyes or bite your own teeth, we cannot cure the mind with the mind.

Wayne Dyer writes that a sign he saw on the wall of a church basement where he attended his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting burned into his psyche like a brand: “Our best thinking got us here.” Relying on the mind to cure the problems of the mind is a fool’s errand.

Does it help to replace bad thinking with good thinking? Certainly. Does it help to set positive intentions and craft a plan of action? Naturally. Right thinking is a necessary preliminary step in the process of restoring sanity. But it is only a preliminary step. Right thinking alone is insufficient.

Instead, Newsom and many others suggest a far simpler approach.

Quiet down, rest in the silence and wait.

You don’t have to fix anything or solve any problems. That’s just more mental manipulation. Instead, sink beneath the mind. For most people, meditation and centering prayer are the best paths to this goal and are profoundly effective if given a chance. When we meditate or practice centering prayer, we practice presence in this now moment and drop down beneath the level of thought. Deepak Chopra calls it entering the gaps between thoughts. Don’t try to stop your thoughts. Resisting them only makes them stronger. Instead, simply notice them, laugh, and settle down like a rock sinking to the bottom of a pool and watch your thoughts slide by above you on the surface as if you were watching clouds drift by in the sky. You are not the clouds; you are not your thoughts. In the content-free, thoughtless silence your compass needle will naturally return to true north all by itself, through no effort of your own. In the same way that we do not consciously digest our own food, grow our own hair or heal our own cuts, inner peace is not an achievement of the mind. It happens only when you break free from the tyranny of the mind.

Great spiritual teachers from Jesus to Yoda all make the same promise: peace is possible – as individuals, as families, as communities and as a planet – if we somehow learn to get off of this crazy, runaway train.

Apollo and Dionysus

Music is the result of an unlikely marriage of opposites: planning and spontaneity, control and surrender, structure and fluidity, order and chaos, crystalline clarity and purple haze. At the songwriting stage, the arrangement and instrumentation stage, the recording stage, the performance stage – every moment in the manifestation of music is guided by a mysterious confluence of paradoxical tendencies – the urge to deliberately create and the urge to effortlessly participate in a creation already taking place. In other words, successful artists learn how to marry their inner creative energies with the creative energies of the universe itself. We can’t, and don’t, do it alone. Nor does music make itself.

For the ancient Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus represented these two essential energies. Apollo was the god of music, prophecy and medicine. He was associated with intellect, deliberation, control, order, reason and clarity. Dionysus was the god of wine. He was associated with chaos, spontaneity, emotions and instinct. On the surface, Apollo seems the most admirable. It is our Apollonian tendencies that enable us to lift form out of formlessness, ordering the infinite possibility of this next moment into a concise, well-crafted stroke. Without discipline, deliberation and lots of sometimes tedious practice our creative juices drain away into shapeless puddles. On the other hand, without our Dionysian tendencies, our well-made structures would stand sterile and lifeless, void of the very essence of all great art – that nameless je ne sais quoi that falls forever beyond the well-creased cuff linked reach of Apollo.

Go into Guitar Center on any Saturday and you’ll see hordes of adolescent wannabe rock stars with ripped jeans, wallet chains and studiously tousled hair test driving Stratocasters through Marshall stacks, buying into the notion that their inner Hendrix is only a Visa swipe away. What most of them don’t realize is that before Jimi lit his guitar on fire at Monterrey, figuratively and literally, he spent ten years in his room practicing nine hours a day. The story goes that Hendrix’s seminal performance of “The Star Spangled Banner” early Monday morning on the last day of Woodstock was completely improvised. He had never performed it before. Jimi’s Dionysian side came out to play with a vengeance, yet never before had his Apollonian mastery been so patently obvious.

Before Eddie Van Halen burst out of the Pasadena house party scene to re-invigorate arena rock in the seventies and turn us all into a generation of tappers, he was just a quiet, studious kid. As a boy he took an old 45 r.p.m. single of Cream’s “Crossroads” and slowed it down to 33 r.p.m. so he could fastidiously learn every single note of Eric Clapton’s masterful performance. Patience, control, discipline, commitment – these are qualities Dionysus knows nothing about.

For the more thoughtful ancient Greeks, Apollo and Dionysus were not really gods living on Mount Olympus. They were merely personifications of energies, organizing principles and modes of consciousness found within the human psyche. Each of us comes bearing the gifts of Apollo and Dionysus. Which one do we call on most often? Which one are we suppressing?

Give in to either completely and watch yourself whither away. If you’re too Apollonian you have no passion. In your obsessive need to control everything you end up utterly disconnected from the meat and marrow of life. You live in your own head. Your disdain for the messiness of other people and for life itself locks you away in a dry, dusty closet of loneliness – a very neat closet, but a closet nonetheless. If you’re too Dionysian you’re just as ineffective, only worse. You hurt other people because you don’t even know they’re there. You worship at the throne of your own moods and feelings, trapped under the powerful sway of often destructive emotions – anger, resentment, envy, fear. You turn to drugs and alcohol, first for the sheer fun of it, then eventually as a daily maintenance program to keep from feeling your feelings. How ironic.

Either tendency, the Apollonian or the Dionysian, if embraced in isolation without its ameliorating opposite, becomes a parody of itself, a prison of its own device. Dionysian spontaneity becomes tired and empty ineffectiveness. Sure you can sing a good tune, but you can’t tune your guitar. On the other hand, Apollonian order and control becomes stiff and lifeless – there’s nothing left to control but the control itself, you’ve choked all the life out of life, like polishing furniture in a home no one lives in.

Legend has it that when David Crosby brought his friend Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead into the studio to play pedal steel guitar on “Teach Your Children” during the infamous Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young Déjà Vu sessions, Garcia set up his rig and told the engineer to push “play” so he could hear the song for the first time while he played along to get his bearings. Instead, under Crosby’s direction, the engineer pushed “record”. When the song ended, Garcia said, “O.K., I’m ready. Let’s take one.”

“Got it,” replied Crosby from the control room.

“What?” asked Garcia.

“Yeah,” said Crosby, “we’re done.”

Having never heard the song before in his life, Garcia played one of the greatest pedal steel parts ever recorded on a blind first take. Dionysian, right?

Yes and no. Garcia had spent the previous three years learning the pedal steel with great focus and discipline, sitting in with his friends The New Riders of the Purple Stage on countless nights in clubs all around the bay area. Garcia’s success on “Teach Your Children” was no accident. It was the perfect synthesis of Apollo and Dionysus.

Dig out your copy of Déjà Vu and listen to Garcia’s part on “Teach Your Children”. Ask yourself this: will you be ready when your time comes? Have you done your homework? Do you show up prepared? Have you mastered your craft? And then ask yourself this: are you ready to let go? Are you willing to abandon control and surrender to the moment? Are you ready to trust the sacred energy welling up within you and binding you to all things?

Are you willing to strike the right balance between Apollo and Dionysus?